r/oregon • u/agenbite_lee • 13h ago
Article/News Oregon Senator Wyden Trying to Close Weird Tax Loophole the Rich Use
Original article here but it is behind a paywall.
Here is the first little bit of the article:
The average American family has about $268,300 in individual retirement accounts. Gregory Baszucki’s holds at least $68 million—and possibly a whole lot more.
Baszucki, 61 years old, is one of hundreds of people who bought stakes in promising startups when the shares were worth peanuts, stashing them in retirement accounts and watching their values balloon to eight figures or more. What they are getting, essentially, is the mother of all tax breaks.
IRAs and workplace retirement accounts were created to help working Americans save for old age by providing tax incentives for doing so. The accounts have been supercharged by startup founders, hedge-fund managers and Silicon Valley insiders who have access to investment opportunities unavailable to most Americans.
Those entrepreneurs and their financial backers are increasingly using that strategy to pile up giant retirement-account balances, all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, The Wall Street Journal determined by analyzing regulatory filings, government data and other documents. The number of people with giant retirement accounts has soared in recent years, aided by booms in both stock prices and startup formation.
More than 1,000 individuals had IRA balances of at least $25 million in 2024, the latest year for which figures are available, according to new data prepared by the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. That was more than double the number with similar-size accounts in 2019.
Those with $10 million or more in IRAs also rose, to about 11,600 people in 2024, from 3,625 in 2019, the joint committee found in its analysis of anonymized tax-return data. About 200 Americans had balances of $100 million or more in 2024, counting both IRAs and 401(k)-type accounts, the committee estimated.
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“We aren’t talking about saving enough for your needs in retirement,” said Steven Rosenthal, a corporate tax lawyer who recently retired after about a dozen years at the nonprofit Tax Policy Center. “This isn’t keeping you off the dole in old age. This is yacht financing or dynasty building.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, plan to introduce a bill this week that would require annual withdrawals from accounts over $10 million for individuals of any age. The planned legislation stemmed in part from long-running concerns that some investors might circumvent annual contribution limits on retirement accounts by undervaluing shares in companies that aren’t public, “thus substantially increasing their tax benefits,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in 2014.
“This is an egregious loophole we’ve got to close,” Wyden said. “Congress created tax-advantaged retirement accounts to help more Americans save for a dignified retirement, not to help the ultrawealthy dodge taxes on insider deals and build titanic fortunes.”
